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Telescope buying tips

If a telescope is on your shopping list, considering a few things will help ensure it provides years of discovery instead of an expensive place to hang clothes.

Posted Updated
tabletop telescopes are a good choice for beginners
By
Tony Rice
, NASA Ambassador

Telescopes are popular holiday gifts that can open up new worlds of exploration or they can be an expensive source of frustration. Selecting the right telescope for that special person on your list doesn't have to be hard once you understand a few terms.

But don't wait too long to decide. Backyard astronomy has been a popular hobby during the pandemic and retailer’s inventories reflect this.

Where to buy

The area’s only dedicated telescope store, Big Bang Astronomy, closed their Duraleigh Road store about a decade ago. Area camera stores have also phased out telescopes from their inventories recently. Big box and even chain drug stores tend to carry telescopes around the holidays, but quality varies widely.

Camera Corner (Camcor) in Burlington can offer help in selecting the right telescope for you and your family, but inventories are low.

“We try to keep a variety in stock, but only have 3 in the warehouse right now.” said Camcor's Bill Liszka. “I’ve got more on order from Celestron but don’t know when they’ll be in.”

You may have better luck from big online retailers such as Amazon as well as the big photo/video retailers in New York like B&H Photo and Adorama as well as directly from manufacturers.

What to buy

Reflecting telescopes provide the best bang for the buck. They gather light with mirrors, passing it through a glass in an eyepiece on the side for magnification. Refracting telescopes pass light through glass (or plastic for the really cheap ones) to an eyepiece on the end to both gather and magnify the image.
Refracting telescopes gather light through a series of lenses, reflecting telescopes add mirrors to that collection and are a better value (Creative Commons)
Altitude-Azimuth (alt-az) mounts move up and down and side to side. They are best for beginners because they are easy to setup and operate. Dobsonian telescopes are reflectors on an alt-az mount that gather lots of light for a relatively low cost but can be bulky and more diffcult to move and setup.
Equatorial mounts are great as you gain experience, especially during longer observing sessions because you only have to move the telescope in one direction to keep that planet or star in the field of view. Younger users can struggle with these though because they must be aligned each time you use them and also requires a time consuming one-time setup to account for the tilt of the Earth and your latitude.
telescope mounts
Stick with brands that focus (no pun intended) making telescopes. Brands like Celestron, Meade, and Orion make nothing but telescopes and related accessories at a variety of price points. Avoid manufacturers in the toy or camera business that only offer telescopes around the holidays.
All three of the manufacturers above offer 100mm (4”) aperture reflector telescopes for under $150 under the names FunScope, FirstScope, and Lightbridge Mini. These do not include a tripod but instead sit on table top. These “first scopes” work great on patio table in the backyard or a campground picnic table. These can outperform much more expensive telescopes because the money goes into the telescope, not a wobbly mount.

Features to consider

Aperture is the measure of the opening where light enters the telescope and should be your first consideration. Bigger openings mean more light which provides brighter, clearer images and bring fainter objects into view.
Focal length measures the length of the telescope. Longer focal lengths provide a more magnified image. Shorter ones are easier to setup and generally get used more as a result.
Eye pieces allow you to control magnification of the image by swapping them out for shorter (wider field of view, less magnification) or longer (more magnification). Your telescope will include at least two. Others can be added later to provide more flexibility as your experience grows. Some telescope packages include a Barlow lens which doubles the magnification of each eyepiece. These can can be purchased separately later to essentially double your options.

Tripods

WRAL photojournalist Richard Adkins wields a tripod for a living. Whether it’s a 4K video camera capturing news or telescope capturing a distant moon, the results depend on the stability of the base they are mounted on.

WRAL's Ken Smith and photojournalist Richard Adkins will be embedded with Fort Bragg’s 18th Airborne Corps as they provide medical support to the local hospital in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, in the wake of Hurricane Irma.

“Like any system, it’s only as good as its weakest link.” explains Richard. “Think of that telescope as a giant zoom lens, the slightest movement, wind, vibrations can make it hard to target an object exceptionally far away.”

Richard’s advice on selecting a tripod? “avoid lightweight cheap things such as like white plastics and lightweight aluminum… if it feels cheap, it is cheap.”

The $19.99 telescopes that show up in chain drug store once the Halloween candy is cleared out are actually better than what Galileo himself used to observe the moons of Jupiter and phases of Venus. It's the thin aluminum tripod legs held together with cheaply made plastic hardware that creates a frustratingly unstable base.

Other items for under the tree

Also, consider an age appropriate astronomy book. Some of my favorites are

  • Find the Constellations and The Stars: A New Way to See Them, both are by H.A. Rey (Curious George author)
  • Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope - and How to Find Them, by Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis. Consolmagno is also known as the "Pope's Astronomer", this research astronomer is also Director of the Vatican Observatory)
  • There's No Place Like Space: All About Our Solar System (Cat in the Hat's Learning Library) by Tish Rabe
  • Constellations for Kids: An Easy Guide to Discovering the Stars, by Kelsey Johnson

Be sure to also have a way for little astronomers to reach the eyepiece. Holding them up doesn't work, they wont see anything. This is a lesson I've learned during years of volunteering at observing sessions sponsored by the Morehead Planetarium.

A small stepladder with a hand grip will give kids something to hold as they peer into the lens. This prevents grabbing onto the telescope which at best knocks it out of alignment and at worst send them and the telescope tumbling.

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